


The Crack Under The Door

by Rakizna



Category: Knight Rider (1982)
Genre: Gen, Prison, Rats
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-03-23
Updated: 2020-03-23
Packaged: 2021-02-28 20:26:55
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 326
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23283217
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Rakizna/pseuds/Rakizna
Summary: Garthe Knight swears a vow while he's rotting in that African prison, staring at the crack under the door...but what he hates most are the rats.
Kudos: 5
Collections: Stories for a Knight





	The Crack Under The Door

The crack under the door bothered him the most. He lost sleep over that crack---what little of it he got to begin with. Stone walls, filthy straw, slit window---none of that as maddening as the crack between the cell door and the dirt floor. It taunted him the first few months, taunted him with the possibility of escape. The dirt there was soft, easy digging...and yet there was no way to do it without alerting a guard and attracting a beating. Or worse, the shackles. He gave up on that sliver of hope early on. No, the far greater taunt of this African filth-hole prison...was the rats.

Satan himself must have birthed these rats. Bigger than their European cousins, with sharp teeth and a temperament worse than Caligula’s. And the eyes. Tiny and soulless, like beads of pitch. Demon eyes. And every night, they would squeeze in through the crack beneath the door, squeeze in and linger amongst the straw on which he was forced to sleep, stealing his meager food and sinking their teeth into his legs, his arms, his back. Aggravating the pain of his knee (broken twice now by his almost-daily beatings from other prisoners) and the inflamed scars on his back (from the brutal whipping he’d received from the lawless guards on his first day). 

He grew to hate the crack under the prison door. And in his nightmares, it became another crack under another door, thousands of miles and several long years away: the door that Wilton Knight had slammed behind him when he had disowned and disavowed his son. His  _ only _ son. 

And every time he woke up from one of those feverish neverending nightmares, woke up covered in oozing bites, Garthe Knight swore a vow. 

One day, his father would pay for all his many sins. He would pay for his sins the way that Garthe had been forced to pay for his…

In blood.


End file.
